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Do clever people outsmart themselves?

acbytesla said:
Sounds like a bull **** excuse to me. Faith is a con. It is straight up gullibility. You just have to believe. Stop using your mind. Just trust our horse **** story.

Is there anything that faith couldn't be used for to believe? And if that is true, couldn't you use faith and be wrong just as easy as you could be right? In fact, I'd argue that if used faith to believe most things, you'd end up believing a lot of stupid things.

Faith is not a pathway to truth. The question for each of us is do we want to believe what is true or what is comforting? No question, a lie can sometimes be comforting. Would you want your doctor to tell you that you have a deadly illness or not? I can see why some people wouldn't want to know.

Beliefs have consequences not just for the believer, but for everyone. Parents disown their children and vice versa because of their religious beliefs. I know parents who wouldn't take their son to a doctor and their son died as a result. Catholics have been entrusting their children to priests only to see some of their children become molested. Your donations to your church could be used for campaign against gays or birth control. Or you could strap a bomb to your chest. Or fly jets into buildings.
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A lot of truth there, but I think history shows that religion has nothing on political ideologies when it comes to encouraging extreme behavior.
It depends on the individual.
 
ANd I see this discussion has little to do with the question asked in the thread title.
TO which the answer is obviously yes. Clever people outsmart themselves all the time. See it just about every day.
 
While that may well be true, I don't think it can be taken as a blanket statement on any particular domain. Generally, if something makes sense when you know less or don't think much about it, but stops making sense when you know more and/or think deeper about it... well, that's usually just your clue that it's false. Usually all it shows is not that using your brains is a liability, but that it helps see the cracks in the facade.
 
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dudalb said:
A lot of truth there, but I think history shows that religion has nothing on political ideologies when it comes to encouraging extreme behavior.
It depends on the individual.
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No question that political beliefs can have detrimental consequences as well. But that doesn't justify detrimental religious beliefs. And I would argue there have been many wars and atrocities that were influenced by religion.
 
Scorpion said:
If there is a God and he created the universe, he is obviously a vast intellect capable of planning an incredible act of creation down to the finest detail.
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This sort of thing makes me laugh. I can't remember who said it, but if God was into intelligent design, then he wouldn't have put the entertainment center right next to the sewer. God certainly did a bang-up job in designing birth defects, down the finest detail, like the exquisite suffering of butterfly babies or those with brittle bone disease. Also, corn vs. the digestive system.


TragicMonkey said:
Spiritual experience does not require deities or belief in deities. In fact such belief may be a hindrance.
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Amen to that.



TragicMonkey said:
A crabby bunny gets less hugs, is how Nietzsche would put it. Or my five year old niece. I get them confused.
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:)
 
Scorpion said:
If there is a God and he created the universe, he is obviously a vast intellect capable of planning an incredible act of creation down to the finest detail. The divine mind would have to make sense to have achieved such a creation.
.
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carlitos said:
This sort of thing makes me laugh. I can't remember who said it, but if God was into intelligent design, then he wouldn't have put the entertainment center right next to the sewer. God certainly did a bang-up job in designing birth defects, down the finest detail, like the exquisite suffering of butterfly babies or those with brittle bone disease. Also, corn vs. the digestive system.

:)
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I actually agree with Scorpion regarding this statement. It's why I know that none of the gods that I have heard proposed exists and especially not the God of the Bible.

The God character in the bible is an incompetent moronic boob that fails over and over again. And then decides that the only way he (god) can forgive man for the offense of Adam was to make himself human flesh for 30+ years and be tortured and killed and to resurrect. Never mind that God made ALL THE RULES.

The story is absurd. It just goes to show as Tommy Lee said about humans. "Oh what a gullible breed".
 
carlitos said:
This sort of thing makes me laugh. I can't remember who said it, but if God was into intelligent design, then he wouldn't have put the entertainment center right next to the sewer. God certainly did a bang-up job in designing birth defects, down the finest detail, like the exquisite suffering of butterfly babies or those with brittle bone disease. Also, corn vs. the digestive system.
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Also see the laryngeal nerve in giraffes. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laryngeal_nerve
 
By the way, in passing, I also question whether it's true that haters must be unhappy. They are likely unhappy as long as those they hate continue to exist, but I'm not sure how unhappy they would be if they are successful.

It would be nice to believe that evil does not bring happiness, but I'm not convinced of that.
 
theprestige said:
It's full of smart, unhappy people.



See? Unhappy.

Unhappy with the thread, unhappy with the thread drift. Probably unhappy with me in general, but the MA prohibits exploring that question.

And you're smart, too. Smart, and unhappy, and here. And you're probably not the only one.
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Are you happy?
 
dudalb said:
ANd I see this discussion has little to do with the question asked in the thread title.
TO which the answer is obviously yes. Clever people outsmart themselves all the time. See it just about every day.
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Hey, I like Scorpion. But he cleverly used a quote from a self admitted fraudster in his trap for those who do not share his belief. So yes, we are too clever for our own good at times.
No harm, no foul, just an oopsy moment.

And I won't be casting the first stone here, I have derped many times myself.
 
TragicMonkey said:
No. Twentieth century physics is not philosophy, nobody has disproved Buddhism with science, and you are not wiser than Spinoza.
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First: the belief that philosophy has been replaced by science in the solution of man's classic problems is a philosophical idea linked to the neo-positivist school and its derivatives. When a scientist or an ignoramus defends this position, he is making philosophy. I am so sorry.

Second: Science is one thing and the interpretation of science is another. Philosophy has nothing to do with the method and results of science. It has to do with the interpretation of those results. This is where scientists make philosophy. Sometimes good and sometimes - unfortunately the majority - bad philosophy. For example, the problem of realism: what do theories correspond to? What is the reality behind scientific theories if any exists? The scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - not to mention the previous ones - are divided into different theories. For example, regarding Ψ (in case any of you ignore it, it's the wave function).

1. It represents something real, certain objective properties of a particular quantum system.
2. It does not represent anything real. It is simply a mathematical instrument for calculating measurement results.
3. It describes our state of knowledge about a microphysical system.
4. It does not represent anything a real, but a set of potentialities that must be updated.
Etc.


These positions and some more, have been maintained by the most outstanding theoretical physicists and still have followers. They mean the classical positions of realism, subjectivism, instrumentalism, phenomenalism, etc. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Von Neumann, Schrödinger, etc. took care of them and confronted each other.

Therefore, first conclusion: Of course scientists make philosophy. At least when they have a certain level and face the interpretation of theories.

On the second proposition: science offers solutions to all the problems posed by classical philosophy, we can enter later.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Essentially, to go with David's cage full of tigers scenario, the tiger and me may well be simulated by a giant alien computer. It may be a shared collective dream. It may all be a Star Trek holodeck scenario. Or whatever. But ultimately it really doesn't matter, and that's why getting bogged in those discussions is ultimately irrelevant for virtually any practical scenarios.

What matters is this: Can I make the tigers disappear if I try really really hard to stop believing they're there? No. Can I stop them from biting when their food is brought? No. Then that's really all I need to know in order to figure out that solipsism won't actually help if I try entering the cage either.

And I don't know what stops me from making them disappear. Maybe, if it's a simulation, the alien programmer of this simulation didn't give that kind of admin power to everyone. Maybe, if it's a collective dream, then everyone else's mind is stopping me from altering the dreams that way. Maybe, if it's my own dream, I don't control the part of the brain that's generating the dream. Or whatever.

But that's not important. What's important is that there are parts that I can't control. I'll conventionally call the collection of those parts "reality".

And given that those parts outside my control exist, I will claim that:

1. Debating their exact nature and how really real are they, is ultimately not making any difference. And

2. Those things work by their own rules, that I can't change by just wishing it to be different. Which is just another way of saying: magical thinking doesn't work. There is still an advantage to learn the way those things actually work, instead of trying magical thinking instead.
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The mental experiment of the solipsist and the tiger was to show that there is no real solipsist and that if he exists he does not just believe himself. From here the debate with the solipsist is meaningless.

For the rest, your position of considering that everything that resists your will is real is a good philosophical point, but it does not end with our problems.

Hallucinations resist my will. I want the crabs and snakes that harass me to go away and there they are. Are they real? The thing becomes more tricky --more sophisticated-- when we talk about measuring the spin of an electron. What are we measuring?
 
While that is a good point, we had some time to figure that one out too, actually. We actually used to believe that dreams and hallucinations are in some sense real. To different degrees and in different ways, depending on the culture, but you could actually get put on top of a nice pile of wood if enough of your neighbours dreamed that you were a witch.

What nailed it was ultimately that there are now ways to make it go away. You start taking the antipsychotic pills, or conversely stop eating the funny mushrooms, and the demons go away.

So in a sense we're back to reality being the part that doesn't.
 
acbytesla said:
No question that political beliefs can have detrimental consequences as well. But that doesn't justify detrimental religious beliefs. And I would argue there have been many wars and atrocities that were influenced by religion.
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Also there's the small, piddling detail that political leaders actually exists and who's head of your country is an actual thing that actually matters.

The same can not be said for God.
 
Unintelligent people out-dumb themselves.

I'm making a sad observation here, not posing a question.
 
David Mo said:
First: the belief that philosophy has been replaced by science in the solution of man's classic problems is a philosophical idea linked to the neo-positivist school and its derivatives. When a scientist or an ignoramus defends this position, he is making philosophy. I am so sorry.

Second: Science is one thing and the interpretation of science is another. Philosophy has nothing to do with the method and results of science. It has to do with the interpretation of those results. This is where scientists make philosophy. Sometimes good and sometimes - unfortunately the majority - bad philosophy. For example, the problem of realism: what do theories correspond to? What is the reality behind scientific theories if any exists? The scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - not to mention the previous ones - are divided into different theories. For example, regarding Ψ (in case any of you ignore it, it's the wave function).

1. It represents something real, certain objective properties of a particular quantum system.
2. It does not represent anything real. It is simply a mathematical instrument for calculating measurement results.
3. It describes our state of knowledge about a microphysical system.
4. It does not represent anything a real, but a set of potentialities that must be updated.
Etc.


These positions and some more, have been maintained by the most outstanding theoretical physicists and still have followers. They mean the classical positions of realism, subjectivism, instrumentalism, phenomenalism, etc. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Von Neumann, Schrödinger, etc. took care of them and confronted each other.

Therefore, first conclusion: Of course scientists make philosophy. At least when they have a certain level and face the interpretation of theories.

On the second proposition: science offers solutions to all the problems posed by classical philosophy, we can enter later.
Click to expand...

You're so smart you're almost stupid. Quit overthinking this. It's not that complicated.

Philosophy merely means love (Philo) of wisdom (sophia) Science was originally another word for knowledge.

Science or knowledge is not a replacement for wisdom. But I don't see how you can love wisdom while dismissing knowledge.
 
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Scorpion said:
If there is a God and he created the universe, he is obviously a vast intellect capable of planning an incredible act of creation down to the finest detail. The divine mind would have to make sense to have achieved such a creation.
Clearly, from the cruelty of nature, God does not concern himself much with our suffering. But this could simply mean in the greater scheme of things suffering serves the purpose of forcing change and growth which could not be accomplished without such pressures..
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Or it could mean he's a dick.

This is just the old "mysterious ways" nonsense. How can you tell the difference between a God who uses suffering to "force change" and a God who uses suffering for his own amusement? How do you know that "change and growth" couldn't be accomplished by other means? Why do "change and growth" need to be achieved at all? If God's as awesome as you seem to think he is, he can do what he wants without having to make people suffer. You're just rationalising the existence of suffering by making up a bunch of stuff that sounds warm and fuzzy if you don't think about it too much.

You don't know. You're making it up. Or you heard it from someone who made it up. Someone made it up.

It's nonsense.
 
Okay let's try to take this to ground.

On a most basic level (and we're already at levels so basic they could explained to a toddler using alphabet blocks) the thing people aren't getting is:

Something existing as a concept does not alter the burden of proof.

The bog standard "Oh so you where's your proof there isn't a God" and IanS at this point baffling crusade against the word "Certain" both misuse this concept.
 
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